The Good Shepherd

by Thomas Fleming

  “He’s a jerk,” Sister Helen said.

  That had a very satisfying sound in Dennis McLaughlin’s ears. He had somehow assumed that Sister Helen was enamored of the city’s leading militant. The thought that there might be a vacuum in Sister Helen’s heart inspired still more revelations from the inner corridors of the chancery.

  First a word-for-word description of the way the Cardinal cowed Father Disalvo. Then the contretemps at Holy Angels, where Monsignor Paul O’Reilly was still doing his utmost to create a confrontation over birth control. Next the worries over the fund drive which did not seem to be going well. The failure of the Republican-controlled state senate to even report out of committee the bill to subsidize the parochial schools, in spite of the Cardinal’s covert offers of political support in the next election.

  On and on Dennis talked while laughing Leo stuck more dark Bourbon and ginger ales into his hand. Negative aphorisms, snide cracks, tumbled from his lips. Sister Helen was smiling now, yes even laughing at Father McLaughlin’s description of the wreckage of the Jesuit order, the Bona Mors (Happy Death) Society, as they called the over-fifties, who sat in their rooms wondering where all the certainties had gone. She murmured her amusement at his recipe for soothing Pope Paul. “Let him take lessons in humility from the Archbishop of Canterbury.” She even chuckled at his solution to the celibacy problem. “Voluntary castration. Peace will descend upon the Church, and the Pope will once more have a choir second to none.”

  They were at the table by now, dining on veal parmigiana as only Grace née Conti cooked it. The wine was flowing, and for some reason, he still had a full Bourbon and ginger ale beside his plate. “Leo,” he said raising his glass, “allow me to toast you as a diplomat second to none.”

  It had been Leo’s idea, this “Easter truce session,” as he called it, between Father Dennis and Sister Helen. He had summoned her to his office for a conference earlier in the month, and she had icily told him she was too busy. Mentioning it to Leo on the phone, he discovered that he and Helen and Grace were old friends. Grace had been in Helen’s class at Mount St. Monica’s. It was easy for Leo to discover that Sister Helen had no place to dine on Easter Day, thanks to her feud with her reactionary father. So the peace banquet had been arranged.

  But Father Dennis had been totally unprepared for the chic, astonishingly beautiful girl who greeted him in his brother’s living room. He had murmured idiotic things about her hair being different, her clothes. Only after the first drink did he regain some shreds of his savoir faire. Now, smiling at Leo through the alcoholic haze, he felt wonderful. The compulsion to play the frowning big brother had strangely diminished, and apparently so had Leo’s fondness for sneering at Mother’s favorite, the Jesuit genius.

  “What are we going to do about it?” Leo said as he raised his glass in response to Dennis’s toast.

  “Do about what?” he said, puzzled by his brother’s harsh tone.

  “The Church.”

  “Little Brother, you are speaking to an intellectual. We don’t do anything. We just talk about it.”

  “Maybe it’s time you started doing something,” Sister Helen said.

  Her voice was amazingly seductive. Dennis realized that she had yet to say a word about the role he had played at the conference with Sister Agnes Marie and Matthew Mahan. It was generous of her to keep such lethal ammunition out of Leo’s hands (or mouth).

  “Don’t you realize, Big Brother,” Leo said, “that you are in a position to get information that could blow up the whole crummy show? You are on the inside - on the inside of one of the most important archdioceses in the United States. Not the most important, like New York - which is precisely what makes it so valuable. An exposé of New York wouldn’t excite the rest of the country one bit. Everyone assumes that everything is rotten in New York, and it wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that the Church had the same disease. But this guy, your guy, is typical. What he’s doing is what most of the other shepherds are doing - the phony image, the controlled press, the secret finances. Do you get a look at his checkbook?”

  “I draw the checks.”

  “Fantastic. Then you see him in action. Absolute master of a $10- or $12-million-a-year operation, with no accountability to anyone but himself and his guardian angel. Has he spent any money recently that might be questionable?”

  A shrug from ossified Father McLaughlin. “He gave his sister-in-law $100 for Easter. All the bills she runs up at the department stores come to us. She’s a widow.”

  “Black widows are living on welfare,” Sister Helen said. “Did he say one word when the governor cut the welfare budget 10 percent last week?”

  “I assume that’s a rhetorical question,” Father McLaughlin said, and for his reward, got another smile. “It was also part of a deal. No protest, and they’d support the parochial school subsidy bill. But the WASPs double-crossed him.”

  Leo began asking questions like a parody of a CIA section chief. Was there a copying machine in the office? Yes, a Xerox. Did he have access to it at any time? Any time. Did he have access to all Mahan’s correspondence? All. How far back? Years. What about tapping his telephone? Now wait a minute. It’s simple, you and he are on the same lines, right? You can tap his phone at your desk. All you need is a cassette tape recorder and a jack with a suction cup. If he catches you, he can’t put you in jail - that would ruin the episcopal image.

  “You’d be back in the ghetto, working with people you really care about,” Sister Helen said.

  Somehow, through the alcoholic blur, a cry almost sprang to Dennis’s lips. My priesthood, my priesthood, don’t any of you understand? whispered the lamenting voice. But obviously no one understood, and the words remained unspoken.

  Instead, over a glass of port they listened to Leo expound the “theology of action.” The Church, he declared, with its stupid clinging to Aristotelian ideas, made a childish distinction between essence and existence. She saw herself as the champion of essentials, which were constantly being stained and muddied by the accidental travails of existence. She moved when she moved at all like a cautious dinosaur. Only when you realized what Jesus was really saying when he declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” did you understand what Christianity really was, a continuous series of implosions that released dynamic revolutionary energy. Truth, way, life, were all one thing - action that defined itself by existing. Without action, there was nothing, the void, nausea.

  It was terrifying, Dennis thought, gripping his refilled port glass as if it were a stanchion that was holding him upright. You are listening to yourself two years ago. All these ideas that Leo is spouting, to the obviously hypnotic delight of Sister Helen, were the nihilistic nostrums of Father Dennis, the man-who-saw-the-revolution-coming-and-when-it-came-did-not-like-it. Yes, you must say that very rapidly because if you stop to think about it, you may throw up.

  On Leo talked. The world with its multiple agonies was forcing America to stop staring into the magic mirror of childhood with its always flattering answers. The same thing was happening to American Catholics. For the first time, they were discovering that their faith did not automatically make them loyal to God and country. So far, more warmed-over Dennis talk.

  But suddenly Leo was on his own, beyond big brother Dennis, moving through new exciting territory. The Catholic Church in this country was one of the few institutions where “a revolutionary situation” existed.

  What was a revolutionary situation? One in which the Establishment has lost its charisma, its prestige, and the expectations of the people were rising faster than the rate at which the Establishment was prepared to meet them. That was the moment when the revolutionaries must renew their efforts with the utmost savagery. The sentimentalists will cry out, wait, give them more time; they are doing their best. Nonsense, of course. No establishment ever voluntarily surrendered its power. Ultimately, power must be ripped from their hands.

  Sister Helen turned to smile admiringly at Dennis. “
It makes sense; it makes so much sense.” She was paying him a compliment. Why? His numb cerebellum gradually deduced that she regarded him as the source of this wisdom. Suddenly the possibility - no, the several possibilities - of the situation coalesced in Father McLaughlin’s double vision. In the glow of Sister Helen’s revolutionary smile, he coolly agreed to supply his brother Leo with all the confidential material he might need from Matthew Mahan’s files to create a book-length exposé that would rock the archdiocese - and hopefully the entire American Catholic Church. Not that Leo would ever write the book, or that Father McLaughlin believed it was worth writing. Leo was much too disorganized, and the realities of Matthew Mahan’s day-to-day activities were much too ambiguous to be worthy of righteous condemnation. No, Father McLaughlin had another motive. As he made his blithe promises, he was remembering his brusque conversation with the Cardinal about celibacy. Suddenly, he saw how to resolve the question for himself in a way that was doubly satisfying.

  The evening ended with a long, cold cab ride downtown. Dashing Father Dennis insisting on taking Helen to her dingy door in the ghetto. More jokes about conferences in the coming weeks to negotiate a truce between Cardinal Mahan and Sister Agnes Marie. “We’ll be very good, we’ll come up with the most harmless imaginable programs,” Sister Helen said. She was silent for a moment, and then, in the semidarkness of the tenement hall, he felt her eyes upon him. “May I ask you about something that puzzles me? Why did you make that devastating comment out at the college the other day? About the sheepfold?”

  “I don’t know. This last year, I don’t know why I’ve done or said a lot of things. I have this sensation of floating in space in one part of myself while the other part of me goes through the motions of living and talking down below, reacting to a situation without any attempt at - coherence.”

  “The void. Not even you - have been able to escape it. When Leo first told me about it - and about you - it explained so much.”

  The hero must now speak with just a touch of tragedy in his voice. “We’re all so locked into the system, body, mind, and soul. Only -”

  “- exceptional ones can break out.”

  Incredible. She had memorized his Great Thoughts. He insisted on escorting her up the three flights of dark stairs. The stench of sweat and several other human effluvia was unbelievable. On the second-floor landing, a man sat hunched against the wall, singing softly to himself. On the third floor, illuminated like the other landings only by the random rays of a streetlight coming through a dirt-smeared window, Sister Helen paused, took out her key, and slid it into the lock. She turned to him, and he said, “Would you be shocked if I kissed you?”

  “A kiss of peace?”

  “You might call it that.”

  He kissed her firmly on the lips. Incredible sensations occurred in his body. When was the last time you had kissed a woman? Seventeen, the night of your senior prom, with your arranged-by-Mother date. The kiss, come to think of it, had come from her, inexplicably, suddenly, as they had said good night. The answer to your question really is: Never. Discounting Mother, you have never kissed a woman before. The realization brought Father McLaughlin very close to weeping.

  On this same Easter Sunday evening, Matthew Mahan sat alone in his office, writing a letter to Rome.

  Dear Mary,

  Thanks for your cable with those extravagant words of praise and for the letter that followed it. The whole thing is still more or less dreamlike for me. It’s hard to believe that in three weeks, give or take a few days, I’ll be in Rome kneeling before the Pope.

  The past week has been the worst one in the year for me as usual. I try to preside at all the ceremonies in the cathedral and keep up a normal work schedule. This invariably leaves me and my secretary frazzled by Easter Sunday. The last time I saw him as he trudged out of here a few hours ago, the poor fellow looked like a fugitive from a concentration camp.

  He’s new. Have I told you his name - Dennis McLaughlin? I can’t remember the last time I wrote to you. He’s an escapee from the Jesuits who got tired of playing intellectual Ping-Pong in the rear areas and decided to see what it was like in the trenches with the troops. I snatched him out of one of our downtown parishes, and I’m not sure yet whether he will forgive me for it. But he’s exactly the sort of help I need. He’s in touch with the youth movement and at the same time is a hard worker and a talented writer. He’s already taken a lot of the pressure off me. My only fear now is that I may not be able to hang on to him. Like so many young people these days, he’s practically tongue-tied when it comes to talking to someone my age. I think he’s also gotten an awful lot of notions into his head about the conservative American Catholic Church and its arrogant authoritarian bishops. Maybe I’m confirming them!

  As our schedule now stands, we’ll be leaving here on April 23. We’re staying overnight in Ireland to give the professional micks in my entourage a chance to do their stuff, and then we’re dropping by Paris for two days so the old soldiers can drive out to visit a few World War II battlefields. We’ll arrive in Rome on the 27th, and we’ll probably stay until May 6. That should give us more than enough time to pay a few visits to the Tre Scalini.

  I could write you a sermon on patience in response to a lot of the things you’ve said recently about the way things are going in the Church. But you can get sermons by the yard in Rome. Why import them? Besides, we’ll have lots more fun arguing about it face to face.

  With much affection as always,

  Matt

  The Cardinal addressed the envelope, sealed it, and went rummaging in Dennis McLaughlin’s desk for a stamp. On his way back to his own desk, he paused to gaze wistfully at the visible portion of his shell collection in the cases on each side of the door. He had several thousand more shells down in the cellar, all carefully stored and catalogued. In the past, he had managed to spend at least one relaxing evening a month changing the upstairs display, cataloging new purchases, deciding what he was now prepared to trade. But for almost a year now, he had not had a single night to spare.

  He picked up an imperial volute from the Philippines - a large brown and white beauty with markings that resembled ancient Greek and Roman pottery - and let his fingers run along the smooth expanding spirals. For a moment, he was back on a Florida beach, excitedly picking up a local version of the same shell, while a stern-faced man gave him a rare smile. Outside the residence, a taxi horn beeped three times. He sighed and put the volute back in its case.

  Riding downtown through the empty streets, he found himself thinking uneasily about the gastrointestinal series that Bill Reed planned to inflict on him the day after tomorrow. Bill had dourly warned him that it included barium enemas and all sorts of other unpleasant, undignified procedures. Bill was unimpressed by his feeble attestation that his ulcer was thoroughly quiescent, thanks to a steady diet of Titrilac and Donnatal. They had to know exactly where it was and how much damage it was doing.

  Matthew Mahan popped a Titrilac tablet into his mouth and chewed it moodily. He began brooding over the words he had just written about Dennis McLaughlin. For all the hard work, he sensed an emptiness, a lack of enthusiasm for the job he was doing. Why couldn’t he reach him - or any of these young people? What was he doing wrong? No answers came, and he glumly began reading his breviary.

  The words of the last verse of Psalm 95 made him smile.

  Forty years I loathed that generation

  And I said: they are a people of erring heart

  And they know not my ways

  Therefore, I swore in my anger

  Even God had his generation gap, it would seem. But where was the blame to be laid today? Who were the people of erring heart? It was too easy to point the finger at the young. He refused to do that because he knew from his own cruel experience with Archbishop Hogan how bitter it could make a young priest - or any young person - feel. Perhaps those early wounds inflicted by old Hogan would at last serve a purpose. Emotionally he was in an ideal position to be a med
iator. Why this dismaying sense of failure every time he tried to play the part?

  Eileen Mahan and her seven children were waiting in the lobby of the Downtown Athletic Club. All except the oldest boy, Timmy, were dressed in new clothes, bought at Conway’s Department Store and charged to his account. Matthew Mahan made no attempt to keep track of how much money he gave his widowed sister-in-law in an average year. He only knew it never seemed to be enough. Eileen Mahan was not a very good moneymanager. But this was not the moment for negative thoughts. He threw himself into an enthusiastic greeting to each of the children.

  “Timmy, how are you?” he said, squeezing his nephew’s limp hand.

  Timmy’s hair completely covered his ears. He was wearing an army fatigue jacket with a dozen or so buttons and emblems on it, all in favor of peace, power to the people, and other causes.

  “I couldn’t get him to wear anything but that,” Eileen Mahan said. “Not even a sports jacket. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Now, calm down, Eileen,” Matthew Mahan said. “We’ll probably see a half-dozen kids upstairs wearing the same costume - and with even longer hair.”

  The expression on Timmy’s face told Matthew Mahan that his easygoing condescension was being scorned. He turned to the rest of the family, five girls and six-year-old Matty. He greeted each of the girls by name and told her how pretty she looked. Alas, if it were only true. All of them had inherited their mother’s buck teeth and narrow jaw. Timmy and his little brother resembled their father. Little Matt was an especially beautiful child, with jet-black hair and a face that exuded Irish pugnacity. He was Matthew Mahan’s favorite. His mother called him a heller and his older brother said he was a spoiled brat, but Matthew Mahan never paid much attention to these complaints. “How are you, young fellow?” he said, taking the small outstretched hand.